On March 3, the same day temperatures in the northern hemisphere spiked to over 2 degrees above normal for the first time in recorded history, Canada’s first ministers gathered in Vancouver to hammer out some common ground on a national climate action plan.
Okay, so the ministers couldn’t agree on a national carbon pricing scheme, but they did eventually promise to mull over “carbon pricing mechanisms adapted to each province’s and territory’s specific circumstances.” We’ll see how far that gets us in Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia, which have expressed resistance.
The first ministers’ Vancouver Declaration On Clean Growth And Climate Change, signed during a seven-hour closed-door meeting, may be short on details like a national climate target. But environmental groups nonetheless issued a flurry of mostly congratulatory press releases anyway, happy to see the premiers agree to concrete measures like accelerating clean energy trade between the provinces, speeding up support for electric vehicles and reducing reliance on diesel fuel in Indigenous communities.
The first ministers have also promised working groups on clean tech, carbon pricing, “mitigation opportunities” focused on slashing emissions, and “climate resilience” and “disaster mitigation” to support communities affected by extreme weather events. They’ve got until the fall to deliver a national climate strategy.
Environmental Defence’s Dale Marshall called the Declaration a “welcome change.” However, he had some reservations about leaving carbon pricing up to the provinces after a unified carbon pricing plan was rejected then postponed by the ministers.
Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Melina Laboucan-Massimo, along with a couple of hundred protesters, gathered outside the meeting and called out the prime minister for suggesting we need pipelines to pay for the fight against climate change, although the declaration itself doesn’t say boo about oil or pipelines.
Says Laboucan-Massimo, “Pushing through new tar sands pipelines will deepen the divisions… and will take us away from the just, low-carbon future our communities need to see.”
The gang behind last fall’s 100% Possible march agree. They’ve been spoofing the PM’s “Liberal logic” in -social media, equating the PM’s March 2 statement around using oil sands wealth to pay for a green economy with “building highways to get more people on transit” and “eating more hamburgers to fight obesity.”
For her part, Green party leader Elizabeth May says “it is something of a miracle” that the first ministers’ meeting went as well as it did.
“That said, we have a long way to go to avoid 1.5 degrees global average temperature increase, the goal of the Paris Agreement. We cannot allow process to replace action. The federal government must begin rolling out its own commitments for action, starting with the Obama Summit in Washington on March 10 and continuing in the March 22 budget. Now is the time for Trudeau to prove he meant it when the Liberal platform promised action within 90 days of the end of COP21.”
ecoholic@nowtoronto.com | @ecoholicnation
